Recipes Great, With Fiddling

March 11, 1993

Molly O`Neill claims she has tested each and every one of the 500 recipes in her New York Cookbook (Workman, 1992). We tried three and had some minor problems with each.

A recipe for Staten Island Pasta with Chicken had too little meat and vegetables for the amount of pasta tossed with them -- giving the dish a bland taste. This was particularly disconcerting because a photo near the recipe shows the pasta covered with goodies.

Also, this recipe supposedly feeds 8 -- but it yielded about 5 quarts, enough for twice that many people. When I asked O`Neill about it, she said her portion sizes were ``New York portions: They`ll feed eight people for two days in a row.``

I also had a problem with Malachi McCormick`s Scallop Pie -- a soupy mixture of scallops and mushrooms in a cream sauce gently touched with sherry, then topped with mashed potatoes and baked. The recipe specified it was to be cooked in an 8-inch deep-dish pie pan. But there was way too much of the tasty chowder-like filling to fit.

Robert Weinstein`s Night Before the Diet Bars -- rich with unsweetened chocolate, chocolate chips and walnuts -- tasted fine but were difficult to cut into neat pieces. A little less baking might have helped (I had cooked it until it tested done, as the recipe recommended and, I admit, maybe a little beyond).

Such problems and inaccuracies are annoying but easy enough to rectify, in most cases.

O`Neill says that future editions will have these and other corrections.